The short history of the United Church of Christ shows the denomination’s commitment to being on the forefront of social justice issues. In 1972, the denomination ordained the first openly gay man to be called to Christian ministry. It continues to dedicate much effort to be “open and affirming” of gay and lesbian Christians in its churches. In 1976, the UCC elected the first African American leader of a racially integrated mainline church in the United States. In 1995, the denomination published the New Century hymnal, the only hymnal released by a Christian church that equally acknowledges both male and female images of God.

The United Church of Christ is organized into regional divisions of conferences, usually consisting of one or more states, and associations, smaller divisions of conferences. The bi-annual meeting of the representative body, the General Synod, is made of delegates chosen by the conferences and other elected voting members. The individual congregations are self-governed in aspects such as worship, finances, and election of ministers but they exercise this freedom in agreement with the decisions made by the respective association, conference, and General Synod. This means that while the larger organization of the United Church of Christ is generally quite liberal, the individual congregations can range from “frozen chosen” to conservative evangelical theology.

All that liberal politics and autonomy can backfire, though. A joke amongst the UCC’s members is that the acronym stands for “Unitarians Considering Christ,” a quip that indicates the tendency of some members to go off the deep end of Christian theology and venture into a potential problem area of Unitarian theology. Debates on the far left of the UCC, as in many other denominations, include issues like whether Jesus was divine in the traditional interpretation of the word and how, if at all, Jesus’ resurrection defines a theology.